Postcards from the End of America

Postcards from the End of America

Roaming the country by bus and train, on a budget, Linh Dinh set out to document what life is like for people. From Los Angeles, Cheyenne, Portland and New Orleans, to Jackson and Wolf Point - Linh walked miles and miles through unfamiliar neighbourhoods, talking to whoever would talk to him: the homeless, the peddlers, the protestors, the public preachers, the sex workers. With an uncompromising eye and indomitable, forthright prose, Dinh documents the appalling and the absurd with warmth and honesty, giving voice to America's often forgotten citizens.

Reviews

-Linh Dinh's Postcards from the End of America is a collection of some of the most brilliant observations penned on the terminal decline of the American empire. He gives a voice to those rendered invisible by a bankrupt corporate press. He has an unflinching honesty, refusing to romanticize the poor while also writing with great empathy about their lives. He lays bare the predatory evil of corporate capitalism, the death of liberty engendered by our security and surveillance state and the human cost of our system of inverted totalitarianism. He would make George Orwell or Joseph Roth proud. There are few writers in America I admire more.- --Chris Hedges, author of Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt -If this nation's ego is represented by the politicians, then its collective unconscious is riding in the seat next to Linh Dinh's on the Greyhound bus, or slumping on the neighboring stool in the dive bar. In these--what do we call them? new-journalist epistles? prose poems? revelatory philippics? absurdist love letters?--Dinh introduces us to the legion of people not encompassed by any candidate's plan for economic recovery. This book is a howl of joy and a laugh of despair.- --Matthew Sharpe, author of Jamestown and The Sleeping Father-In today's celebrity-obsessed culture so focused on the antics of the wealthy and the famous, Linh Dinh stands as one of the only chroniclers of the gritty underside of our society, a very worthy successor to Jacob Riis of New York City's Gilded Age. In our increasingly impoverished country, if you want to understand the life of the other half--or the other two-thirds--there are few better guides to the texture of those dismal streets and alleys than Postcards from the End of America.- --Ron Unz, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and publisher of The Unz Review

Author description

A recipient of a Pew Foundation grant, a David T. Wong Fellowship, a Lannan Residency and, most recently, the Asian American Literary Award, LINH DINH was born in Saigon in 1963 and emigrated to the United States in 1975. An acclaimed and provocative writer of short stories and contemporary fables, he is also the author of several books of poems and a novel, Love Like Hate. Linh has edited the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam and Three Vietnamese Poets. His collection of stories, Blood and Soap was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the Best Books of 2004. Linh's nonfiction essays have been published regularly at Unz Review, LewRockwell, Intrepid Report and CounterCurrents, and his blog, Postcards from the End of America (linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com), is followed by thousands of readers. He has also published widely in Vietnamese.